State pension age predicted to rise to 70 even if triple lock is scrapped

Millions of workers under 40 face having to work until age 70 before they can claim their state pension — even if the triple lock is abolished. Experts believe the state pension age will increase to 70, even if the triple lock is scrapped following repeated warnings about the strain it places on the public finances. The mechanism guarantees the state pension rises each year by the highest of inflation, wage growth or 2.5 per cent, but costs have ballooned in recent years following economic shocks. Shorts The state pension age, which is currently set at 66, is already set to increase, to help manage the costs of an ageing population, as rising life expectancies mean people can spend significantly longer in retirement. It was due to rise gradually to 68 between 2044-2046, but this week a new report by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the Government’s fiscal forecaster, said this is expected to be brought forward by seven years to 2037-39. The change would mean around five million people currently aged 49 to 55 would be need to work for a year longer than expected before qualifying for the state pension, unless they had sufficient private funds to retire on. Steve Webb, a former pensions minister in the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government, told The i Paper it is “not sustainable” to hold the retirement age “regardless” of the debate over the triple lock policy, and its strain on the public finances. Webb, the architect of the triple lock, who is now a partner at consultancy LCP, said the Government’s ongoing pensions review, launched in July 2025, could recommend setting a date for the state pension age to rise to 69. The OBR’s forecasts also expect the retirement age to rise to 69 in the 2070s. But Webb said that workers under the age of 40, and “particularly the under-30s”, are “at risk” of it hitting 70. He said such a controversial change is likely to be “decades away” as no politician would want to take the “flak for raising the pension age to 70” when it remained a long way off in the future. “The outcome could indeed be precisely that, but we won’t know for sure for many years to come because no one wants to announce it,” Webb added. The annual cost of the state pension is already around £150bn and is expected to rise from 5 per cent of GDP to 9 per cent over the next 50 years without a change of policy, according to the OBR. Tom Selby, the director of public policy at AJ Bell, said that the rising expenditure – largely due to improvements in the average life expectancy – means the Government “must do something” to bring costs down, otherwise it will need to “substantially pare back spending in other areas”. He added that it would be “no surprise to see the state pension age eventually hit age 70 for today’s younger workers” and urged them to build up private pensions. Abolishing the triple lock is often touted as an option for bringing spending on pensions under control, with the OBR estimating it would reduce projected spending in 2076 from around 9 per cent of GDP under the current policy to around 7 per cent. High levels of inflation have seen costs balloon to around £146bn a year, which is already equivalent to 5 per cent of GDP and more than double the amount spent on defence. Privately, many Labour MPs have signalled that the mechanism should be ditched for reasons of generational fairness. They want pensioners to be protected in a more affordable and sustainable that means younger workers are not having to foot a growing bill for the older generation. But moving away from the policy is seen as politically toxic as no politician wants to isolate the pensioner vote. Webb said the retirement age must rise “regardless” of what happens to the triple lock. He pointed out that the state pension age for men was first set at 65 in the 1920s, meaning that even after the scheduled increase to 67 between 2026 and 2028, it will “only have risen by two years in over a century”. “When you think of everything that has changed over that period, it’s clearly not sustainable to hold state pension ages,” he said. Selby agreed, saying: “Regardless of what happens to the triple lock – and it will eventually have to be scrapped – further and possibly faster state pension age increases are all-but-inevitable; the only real question is when?” The OBR projected that work participation among those aged 70 and older is set to rise from around 7 per cent to nearly 10 per cent over the next 30 years, largely driven by increases in life expectancy and planned state pension age increases. But Webb warned that forcing retirees to work until the age of 70 should be a “last resort”. Last week, Sir Keir Starmer told reporters that it would be for incoming prime minister Andy Burnham to decide whether to keep the triple lock mechanism after the next election, due in 2029. There is so far little consensus among Labour MPs over whether the state pension age increase to 68 should be fast-tracked. Labour MP Graeme Downine said the state pension age “probably should rise” but that the triple lock should also be addressed. He called for an “open and honest discussion with the public”, where ministers are frank about what the retirement age should be and the support working-age people should come to expect. “If we’re going to talk about what the right age is to receive the state pension, then we should also talk about what that pension is and make sure it is sustainable and affordable and meaningfully tackling pensioner poverty,” he said. “Without a conversation alongside about the triple lock we are not confronting these issues, we are just putting them off to another day which will make it all the more difficult when we do have to confront it,” he added. But left-wing Labour MP and member of the Socialist Campaign Group, Jon Trickett, said it is not “right” to raise the state pension age and called for a wealth tax to raise money to support an ageing society. He pointed out that healthy life expectancy in England has fallen over the last decade to an average of 60.9 years for men and 61.3 years for women, according to the Office for National Statistics, with those in the most deprived areas spending far fewer years in good health. “In these circumstances, how can it be right to ask people to work until they are even older?” Trickett asked.